The Project

Harriet was to spend Friday night with Carrie. The only other time she had ever slept over somewhere was when Adam had had pneumonia two years earlier, when Harriet was four, and she had stayed with her grandmother in her apartment for three nights. Gay’s chiming clock, a clock Gay called Ursula, as though it were an ancestor who had somehow been preserved in this form, had woken Harriet throughout each night. But Carrie wouldn’t have a fancy clock like that.

Harriet had never gone anywhere with Carrie before, and she couldn’t tell if Carrie really wanted her to go home with her. But after a rushed after-school snack of cookies and milk, which Harriet ate alone at the kitchen table while Carrie tidied things up, when it was time to leave the house and walk to the subway stop, Carrie held out her hand to Harriet and gave her a big smile, and Harriet suddenly looked forward to the adventure.

Carrie’s apartment was in the depths of Brooklyn; it was a long subway ride from Oxbridge Gardens. If they were to ride in the front car, they would have to walk a block more at the other end, but Carrie agreed to it, making Harriet’s pleasure complete. Carrie sat in the seat nearest the front door of the train, next to a Chinese man who had his eyes closed. She faced the engineer in the little booth behind a windowless door; he couldn’t be seen from inside the train, but interested passengers could hear occasional bursts of squawky static on his radio, and his answering voice, and Harriet had seen him when the train had pulled into the station.

She stood with her nose pressed to the glass and swayed with the rhythm of the train, bracing herself against the door panel but not wanting to give the impression that she needed to hold on in order to keep her balance. The engineer made the train go slower or faster, but he didn’t have to steer. Harriet thought it was much more thrilling than driving a car, this business of making the train just go. What freedom. Sometimes she dreamed about gliding on a perfectly smooth track. It would curve up, and up, until she would be sailing through the air. Every time Harriet woke from this dream she was struck anew with the terrible realization that she could not fly.

The rails glittered in two sweeping curves as they sped through the grottoes of subway tunnels that seemed both sinister—the shiver and thrill when Harriet glimpsed a rat lurking beside a puddle—and splendid with grandeur and what seemed to be ancient meaning. The familiar Piranesi print in Gay’s foyer was, Harriet thought, a reasonable representation of the IND line.

Occasional lights of a local station flashed by as they plunged along importantly on the express track. A chain crossed the door on the outside, and the glass window was embedded with miniature chicken wire. There was no chance that a child was going to fall out of this door, especially a careful child who wouldn’t dream of touching the door handle, a careful child who was unusually cooperative (they always said that, a praising expression that served as a reminder of this expectation above all others), a careful child who didn’t have to be told things twice. She rocked on her heels and toes and peered at the hurtling gloom.

Carrie had her usual shopping bag between her feet, and her purse, along with Harriet’s overnight bag, stowed on her lap. From time to time Harriet turned to see her; she was always looking back and smiling. The child was relieved that Carrie didn’t think it was necessary to stand with her or for them to sit together. Harriet knew Carrie’s feet hurt and would have given up her place at the front of the train rather than cause Carrie to stand for the long ride. Over Carrie’s head was a sticker, illustrated with a cartoon drawing that reminded Harriet of an old book at Gay’s, about Barnaby and Mr. O’Malley. It said, “Little Enough to Ride for Free? Little Enough to Ride Your Knee.”

Harriet loved paying her own fare. On the three or four occasions she had gone “into the city” (which is what they called going to Manhattan, although Oxbridge Gardens was already part of New York City) with her mother since she had passed the age of ducking under the turnstile and riding for free, she would be given a dollar bill so she could buy her two tokens herself. In exchange for the dollar shoved under the window in the hollowed wooden scoop on the counter that Harriet could just reach, a hand, just a glimpse of brown knuckle, would shove back two dull brass tokens and some change.

Harriet would keep the two tokens and immediately drop one into the slot of the turnstile and lunge through, using all her strength to turn the paddle and process herself through to the other side, where she would arrive transformed into a passenger. The second token Harriet would keep in her glove for a while, feeling its engraved surface against her palm when she held tightly to a pole. Then she would give it to her mother to keep.

Carrie had produced two tokens from a change purse and had dropped them both into the turnstile slot; she didn’t know that Harriet liked handling her own token, because they had never ridden the subway together before. Harriet had never seen Carrie away from the Roses’ house, except once or twice when bad weather had made it necessary for Harriet’s mother to pick Carrie up or drop her off at the subway station, and Harriet had gone along for the ride in the car. Now they were out among strangers together, both of them shy about it.

As the train raced on, with longer stretches between stations as they left Queens and headed into Brooklyn, Harriet realized that this was the ride Carrie took every morning when she came to work, and every evening when she went home.

Harriet turned around and looked down the subway car. There were fewer people now. At one point there had been so many people standing between them that Harriet had worried because she didn’t have a clear sight of Carrie, just a glimpse of her hands folded on her lap in front of the bags. All the people looked tired. Carrie looked tired. Her head was tipped back and her eyes were closed. Now, feeling Harriet’s gaze, she opened them, located the child, and smiled. She patted the seat beside her where the Chinese man had been. Harriet hadn’t seen him get off. She would never see him again. She wondered if he had thought something equivalent when he had gotten off the train at his stop: “Look at that little girl in the red sweater. I wonder where she’s going. I’ll never see her again. Good luck, little girl.”

The Chinese man who ran a little restaurant near Oxbridge Gardens always said “Good luck,” and Harriet had come to think that it was a particularly Chinese thing to say. The way he said it sounded more like “Good ruck.” His restaurant was called Lucky Garden, and when he answered the telephone, he said, “Rucky Godden.”

Harriet asked him once if he got a fortune every day, and he told her that Chinese people don’t eat fortune cookies. He had been eating behind the cash register, shoveling something from a rice bowl quickly into his mouth with shiny black chopsticks, different from the plain wooden ones that Harriet’s father (and no one else) was using at their table.

“Only for people like you, missy,” the Chinese man explained, waving with his chopsticks in the direction of the table where the Rose family sat with the Antlers, who had just moved in next door. Harriet was embarrassed, and unclear about what people like her were like, and she ran back to the table with the soy sauce her father had sent her to fetch. They were the only customers in the restaurant, and it was to be the only time the two families went out for dinner together.

Harriet described what Mr. Lucky Garden had been eating. Mr. Antler said that the real food Chinese people ate was never on the menu, and Mrs. Antler giggled and pretended to bark like a little dog. Harriet’s father said, Oh, my God, and stood up suddenly, in order to fish his money out of his pocket so he could pay their share of the check. This would be another evening of early escape for him, when he would go back into the city to deal with the never ending postseason crises of Rose Lights, wholesale manufacturers and importers of Christmas-tree lights to the trade. It was the time of year that stores returned defective and unsold merchandise, and Simon Rose chewed Maalox tablets as if they were candy corn most of the month of January.

Harriet’s mother turned to Adam and began wiping at the sides of his face with a napkin she moistened in his water glass. He continued to chew the food in his mouth and swing his foot against a table leg in identical rhythm, oblivious to her ministrations. Today was a no-talking day, though Adam would always be willing to break his silence in order to read something, anything, out loud. Ruth had told him in the car that he wasn’t going to be permitted to read the menu to everyone—it was much too long—so he contented himself now with a brief reading from the words on the paper packet in which Simon Rose’s chopsticks had been brought to the table.

“Please try your nice Chinese food with chopsticks, the traditional and typical of Chinese glorious history and cultural,” Adam read, with great animation. His relatively cogent delivery when reading was one of those mysteries, like the way stammerers can sing flawlessly.

“Thank you, Adam, that was very good,” Mr. Antler said graciously. Adam stared at him, then went on, “Product of China.”

“Excellent, very well done,” praised Mr. Antler.

“Packed for Well-Luck Co., Inc., Jersey City, N.J. 07139.” Adam knew to say company for Co. and incorporated for Inc.

“Well done, you’re a very good reader, young fellow,” Mr. Antler tried again. Adam looked at him until he stopped talking, then looked down again at the strip of red paper in his hand.

“U.S.A.” Now Adam really was finished.

The Antler children, Barbara and Debbie, began to squabble over the last sparerib. Mrs. Antler sighed and put both hands on her belly; she was very pregnant with another little Antler, who would turn out to be Rachel, the third girl.

Harriet’s father stood beside the table and rested his hand on the top of Harriet’s head, and she sat very still. She sensed that he hated being there with all of them, but his hand on her head was like a sign that she alone was not a source of shame, and for that moment Simon Rose seemed to be including his daughter in his state of separateness from and scorn for these neighbors (whom Simon Rose regarded as vulgar and tedious, two words whose meanings he had explained to Harriet during the drive to the restaurant in the Roses’ beat-up old Cadillac that Simon Rose had accepted in lieu of payment from some down-and-out wholesaler; while listening to this vocabulary lesson, Harriet had angled herself in the backseat until she could see in her father’s side mirror the Antlers, who looked as if they were singing, following behind them in their Dodge Dart), his wife (“Not a real woman,” he had confided more than once to his daughter, who wasn’t sure what he meant), and his son (whose strangeness left no evidence of early brilliance and felt to Simon Rose like a betrayal).

Harriet sat down next to Carrie in the Chinese man’s seat, and the housekeeper put her arm around the child. Her hands smelled pleasantly of hand lotion, and Harriet liked the pink of her polished nails. They were so long and tapered. Carrie always took care of her hands, and she wore thick rubber gloves when she scrubbed the Roses’ house.

“Are you tired, Rabbit?”

Harriet shrugged and gazed up at the advertising placards overhead.

“We get off at the next stop.”

Harriet read about a secretarial school, a hemorrhoid ointment, and a pill for backaches. There were instructions in English and Spanish about not getting out of the train if it stopped between stations. She hoped the train would not stop between stations. The brakes began screaming and a number of people began gathering up their parcels and newspapers as they were all first pressed forward with the motion of the train, and then, when the train halted, all flung back. The doors opened, letting in cooler air from the station. Harriet ran her hand over the hard orange seat and thought that she would probably never sit on that particular seat ever again, in her whole life. Carrie grabbed her hand and they were off the train and up two flights of stairs at a breathless trot, moving faster than most of the people around them, who all seemed headed in the same direction.

Harriet couldn’t have said what she had been expecting. In countless kitchen conversations, Carrie talked about “the project” all the time, but Harriet hadn’t ever realized exactly what she meant. Harriet knew it had to do with where Carrie lived, where other members of Carrie’s family lived, and friends she mentioned from time to time. Harriet thought it was something like a school project, or a meeting of some kind, a club. It seemed to be a community, she gathered that much, but she still held a vague mental picture of a group of people gathered around some sort of shared idea or activity.

Carrie’s project was none of those things. It was a sea of tall red-brick buildings. They were set on a flat plain of concrete, punctuated here and there by chain-link fences and concrete benches. She steered Harriet in the direction of her building, and swinging their clasped hands between them, they went in through a pair of heavy, scarred doors.

Harriet had anticipated an elevator, a fond association she made with the few apartment buildings in her experience. But no elevator was in evidence, and they began trudging up some dimly lighted stairs. After the first two flights, Carrie told Harriet it would be two more. Carrie was carrying Harriet’s overnight bag, and the little girl worried as she heard Carrie’s knee joints crack at every step.

The apartment was a relief, it was so clean and ordered. Harriet had been holding her breath intermittently all the way up the stairs, and now she let it out and took in a deep breath of safe apartment air. She followed Carrie through the living room to a bedroom, where Carrie laid her charge’s overnight bag on a tightly made bed.

“This is where you’ll sleep, Rabbit,” Carrie said, smoothing the child’s hair. “Do you like it?”

Harriet nodded politely. “Where will you sleep?” she asked as Carrie picked up a net from her dresser and did mysterious things to her hair with it.

“I’ll sleep on the couch tonight. I want you to get a good night’s sleep so your mama knows I took good care of you.”

Carrie stationed Harriet at her little kitchen table with a glass of milk, poured from a new carton, while she fixed their supper of franks and beans. She put them all together in one pan to warm them up.

The two were eating pound cake that Carrie had brought to the table in a white box when Harriet heard the sound of a key in the lock. She looked anxiously at Carrie, who laughed and said, “That must be Dwight,” and Harriet understood. She liked Dwight. He was one of Carrie’s twin sons, and he sometimes appeared at the Roses’ house and did yard work. The other twin, David, had always been more distant. He had a mustache, and Carrie had recently discovered that he also had a wife and child. Now they didn’t “recognize” each other.

“That great big rusty boy, could you imagine he would do all that and not tell me I was a grandmother?” Carrie had testified in the kitchen at 23 Rutland Close, to Harriet mostly, as the child ate lunch while Carrie ironed. “I could have gone to my grave not knowing I had grandkids,” she said more than once. Harriet was not surprised at anything David had done behind his mother’s back. He had always seemed shifty, and the mustache had seemed like a disguise that made him the false twin. Once, Harriet saw him closing her mother’s handbag as she came into the kitchen right after he had gone in for a cold drink. He had slipped his hands into his pockets and winked at Harriet, who had pretended to ignore him.

Dwight was, Harriet thought, handsome. He had been a teenager when his mother had first come to work for the Roses; now he was twenty-five. He wore tight white T-shirts and he lifted weights. It wasn’t clear to Harriet where he lived, and as he pulled up the third kitchen chair and helped himself to pound cake, she was concerned that by her presence she was somehow displacing him as well as Carrie. He asked the little girl questions about school while he ate. He tipped his chair back and reached around behind him with one hand to open the refrigerator door in a practiced gesture, but as his hand closed on what Harriet could see was a beer bottle, she saw Carrie shake her head and tilt it in Harriet’s direction, and he let go of the bottle and groped toward a half-empty soda bottle instead, which he drained in one long pull. Harriet loved the way the skin on his forehead was shiny and perfect-looking. When Carrie said it was time for small people to have a bath, Dwight tweaked Harriet’s nose, kissed his mother on the cheek, and left.

From her bath, Harriet could hear Carrie washing dishes, and then she could hear voices. At first she thought it was a radio, but she recognized Carrie’s laugh and hurried to finish the bath and put on her pajamas before anyone came into the bathroom. As she dried herself with Carrie’s flowered towel—at home all the towels were one blue—she was fascinated by the mottled green linoleum floor, which looked like marble or a myopic seascape. Harriet had never seen linoleum on a bathroom floor. She thought it was beautiful.

When Harriet emerged from the steamy bathroom, the air in Carrie’s living room seemed especially clear and cool. Two strange ladies were drinking coffee in the kitchen with Carrie. She introduced Harriet proudly, and as the little girl shook hands with them and said how do you do the way very polite children did, Harriet pretended that she didn’t see them exchange looks over her head.

As there were only the three kitchen chairs, Harriet stood in her bare feet while the ladies chatted, unsure about what she was supposed to do next. Carrie drew her onto her lap, where she felt too big, but it was nice.

“So this is the child,” said one of the ladies, looking at Harriet with momentarily sad eyes.

“What kind of car does your daddy drive?” asked the other one in a chirping, too bright voice, waving her hand in a warning gesture to her friend. Harriet had no idea who they were, but gathered they were also part of this project.

“Well, it’s a Cadillac”—here, the ladies looked at one another knowingly—“but we got it for free from a man who owed my father money,” Harriet explained, not wanting them to think the Rose family rich.

“L. T. just got himself a Pontiac last week,” one lady said to Carrie, who seemed to know who L. T. was. Who was L. T.? “And I told him, I says to him, ‘L. T.,’ I says, ‘L. T., do you know what Pontiac stands for?’ ” The lady was already laughing before she could get out the rest. “And then I told him, ‘Poor Old Nigger Thinks It’s a Cadillac!’ ”

They all laughed uproariously. Harriet was shocked by the use of the word nigger, which she was forbidden to utter and had only whispered alone, experimentally, looking in the bathroom mirror. She couldn’t believe that these three ladies were smiling and laughing. Hadn’t they heard? Soon after, it was time for the visitors to leave, and they all did their polite handshaking routine again, and then it was bedtime.

Carrie made sure that Harriet brushed her teeth, and she washed the child’s face all over with a soapy flowery washcloth. Harriet had forgotten to wash her face in the bath. Then Carrie tucked Harriet tight into her bed, which smelled faintly of her.

Carrie asked, “Do you want to say prayers with me?” Harriet didn’t answer, and Carrie murmured some sort of prayer with her hand on the small head that lay on her pillow. She sat with the child in the dark for a while, and Harriet listened to the tick of Carrie’s bedside clock, and to the sound of a siren that passed nearby. When it had died away completely, Harriet startled her by saying, “Carrie?”

“Here I thought you were asleep. Did the siren wake you?”

“No, I wasn’t sleeping. Carrie? That lady said ‘nigger.’ ”

“Oh, Alice doesn’t mean no harm. L. T.’s an old fool.”

“But, isn’t it a bad word?”

“Sometimes it is, sometimes it is,” Carrie said, smoothing the covers over Harriet.

Harriet thought the words a dozen times before she said them. Then: “What is a nigger?”

Carrie chuckled softly. Then she said, “It’s a nasty word for black people.”

Harriet gazed up into Carrie’s face. She saw what she had always seen and never noticed. “You’re black,” she whispered, reaching up to touch a smooth cheek with one fingertip. Carrie smiled down at her and didn’t say anything.

The next day, after a breakfast of cornflakes, they retraced their subway ride back. By the time they had walked from the subway station to Rutland Close, it was the time Harriet usually got up on school mornings. Harriet could hardly believe it was only early morning after all that. She was exhausted.

Carrie had worn her uniform to work this morning. She didn’t always. Sometimes she arrived in a pretty skirt and sweater and changed into her uniform, which hung in a closet in the guest room on the third floor. She only worked a half day on Saturdays.

Ruth Rose met them at the front door, a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She was wearing the bathrobe she put on when she wasn’t planning to get dressed at all. Harriet wondered if she had been crying.

When her mother bent down to kiss her, Harriet could smell on her breath the winey sweetness that was typical of grown-up breath when they came to tuck you in during a dinner party. Gay was different, though. Gay never had any bad smells. Harriet suddenly missed Gay and wished she wasn’t in Paris for so many weeks.

“It’s all done,” Harriet’s mother said to Carrie, then straightened and turned half away from Harriet. She took one last drag on her cigarette and stubbed it out on the inside of the cup. She dropped the butt into the inch of milky coffee and it floated there. She handed the cup to Carrie and added, gazing out the open front door into the middle distance, “There are some bags of things for your church. You should take a taxi today. Let me know how much it is, okay?”

Harriet stood close by Carrie a moment longer, not liking the feeling of change in the air. What was all done?

Ruth Rose hunkered down again and took Harriet by her shoulders. Carrie carried the cup past them toward the kitchen, and then Harriet could hear water running and the sounds of dishes being washed. “I’ve cleared out your brother’s things,” her mother said, staring into Harriet’s face as if she was searching for something. Harriet avoided her gaze and looked down. “Harriet?”

“What?”

“Adam’s things are taken care of. I’m leaving that room locked for now. I put some of his toys into your playroom. Do you understand? I don’t want you trying to go into his room for anything. There isn’t anything in there you would want. It’s just a room now.”

Carrie had the sink filled with sudsy water, and her gloved hands were dipping in and out with glasses and plates. The radio on the counter was playing softly. It was the kind of music that Harriet recognized as the kind Gay liked best, with a man singing about love while music tootled along.

The music reminded Harriet of the moment the previous week when the principal of the school, an old lady with bluish hair named Mrs. Gregory, had walked into the classroom. Mrs. Gregory had apparently been very impressed when she learned from Adam’s obituary notice in the newspaper that Harriet was the granddaughter of Gay Gibson. Her condolence call, and her attempt to bring this into a conversation with Harriet’s mother, irritated Ruth, who told Harriet that she now had a new, additional reason for avoiding Mrs. Gregory at PTA meetings.

Lately, whenever Mrs. Gregory passed Harriet in the hallways, she bestowed on her the smile she saved for her most favored children, the ones whose parents invited her for dinner or gave her nice presents for Christmas. Mrs. Martin was just then fiddling with the radio to find the music enrichment program to which they were supposed to listen when Mrs. Gregory arrived in the classroom.

“I thought I’d found the girl of my dreams / Now it seems / This is how the story ends …,” had poured out of the radio, sung by one of those men with a big, creamy voice.

“Harriet Rose will now tell us all who is singing,” Mrs. Gregory had announced, astonishingly, pointing to Harriet.

“Bing?” Harriet had guessed, scrambling to her feet, knowing that it would have to be Bing or Frank or Mel. Those were the ones her grandmother liked best. Mrs. Gregory beamed at her, and Harriet was relieved to have guessed right. She never did understand why Mrs. Gregory had assumed that she would know something like that.