After six weeks in Boston, I find a job helping recent immigrants and refugees find jobs. Also living arrangements, English lessons, assimilation services—the Women’s Resettlement Center does it all.
The Center is a chaotic, five-person operation on the third floor of a building near the Common. I work out of a small, windowless room. There is a file cabinet in one corner, and in the other some determined soul has squeezed three plastic, maroon chairs around a table meant for two. I think the room might have been a storage closet once, but if so, no one is letting on.
I leave the walls blank but tape a sign-up sheet to my door where clients can schedule times to meet with me. This helps, using the word “clients,” makes the whole organization feel much more professional than the unsettling lighting and haphazard rooms suggest. I am here to help. I have clients, charges on this strange tour; I will ferry them into their new country with as little transitional damage as possible.
When I describe the job during my biweekly phone call home, my father says, “Well that certainly sounds noble, Mae, but does it pay?”
From the previous Employment Specialist I inherit two coffee-stained mugs and a manila folder encasing a pile of blank applications: restaurants, hospitals, hotels. The Big Three. In their former countries my clients were teachers and psychologists, engineers, sales clerks, mothers, and here they can be maids or work the fast food drive-through.
“We all start somewhere,” Marla, my supervisor, reminds me over blueberry maple muffins on the last morning of my first week. Crumbs nestle in the wrinkles of her linen top. My two other co-workers reach for muffins, nod at Marla’s words. I nod with them. I am one of these women now, the four of us and the Center director, Ellis, all members of the same tiny pack—five she-wolves draped in rumpled clothing and good intentions.
The first month is a gnawing blur. One of my clients is a woman from Nepal with an unspeakable burn covering a third of her skin. One client was a professor of sociology in Chile for almost 20 years and now comes to me three times in one week to freshen her resume, hoping a rearranged comma might finally get her an interview. Two of my clients are sisters, sturdy, fair-haired women with matching thin lips that remain flat, silent as I demonstrate different websites where they can look for jobs. They whisper to each other when I am finished, hiding their lips behind cupped hands even though I don’t speak their language.
Marla and Kathy, the other Intake Supervisor, soften their eyes when they hand me a new file, voices hushed and compassionate. Ifrah, she’s been through a lot. Deported the first time she came here, and she was only a teenager. She’s been in Dadaab the past two years, terrible, of course, oh but she is so sweet, and her English is very good, we should be able to find something for her no problem…
Ellis, the director, simply tosses new files on my table and runs through the contents like a grocery list: Miriam, 44, Iraqi, widowed, depressed, sewing and baking skills; Lan, 23, Vietnamese, sex trafficking, abuse, drugs, possible PTSD, Intermediate-to-Advanced English. My days overflow with the seemingly impossible. I sit next to my clients at the cramped table, our maroon chairs tilted to face each other, metal legs kissing at the curves, and it makes no sense that they must now depend on me.
The first time I meet with Lan she drags her chair toward the file cabinet and sits across the room from me, running a twist of long, lank hair through her fingers. Her eyes are red. She has been fired from another job, a coffee shop this time.
“He say I speak too softly. No one can hear me.” Lan looks down at her lap.
“Okay,” I say. “That’s okay.”
Lan works on filling out applications for the Big Three while I scroll Craigslist looking for anyone that might be willing to hire a Vietnamese woman with the equivalent of half a high school education. She shuffles one paper to the top and stares at the big green hotel logo on the letterhead.
“Cleaning rooms,” she says, neither a question or a statement she really expects me to respond to. I wish I had something more reassuring to offer her, after everything she has been through.
“What do you know about ink?” I ask.
The other day I heard from an elderly, Ecuadorian client that a whole cluster of immigrants and refugees are employed at a pen factory outside the city. I don’t know exactly what the women do at the pen factory; I assume they make pens, or put ink in pens, or emboss brand names on pens, or a combination of all these things. Maybe there is an assembly line a mile-long, divided into all the most important pen-making steps.
No matter what is done there, she had made it sound like a nice sort of place, like there was a camaraderie among the women and less of a physical toll than other jobs. I imagine there must be a lot of mindless sitting around at the pen factory, perhaps on plush swivel chairs. The managers probably don’t yell—there is no urgency to making pens—and lunch break is a long, peaceful hour. And the workers have an unlimited supply of pens at their disposal, can spend free time doodling or scratching out grocery lists or practicing the strange new loops and angles of the English language.
A non-threatening kind of place, I thought when she told me about it. I was taken with the pen factory. A nice, easy, yawn of a job that might help my clients tread water, at least for a little while.
I tell Lan I will look into the pen factory, if she wants me to. I will call the manager on her behalf, see what I can do.
“Okay.” She shrugs. “Thank you.”
A rhythm emerges. During the day I meet with clients or scour classified ads and job postings or make slow headway in transferring hundreds of paper files to the new digital database. At night or in the early mornings, I run along the Charles River, pushing my body faster, longer, even as the season turns crisp and cracked gray.
I had thought I might make friends at work, but my co-workers are all older than me with families that keep them busy, and so on the weekend I share quiet breakfasts with my roommate Morris, each of us reading separate copies of the same paper because we like to do our own crossword puzzle.
Morris is a graduate student in the geology program at MIT. He is at school often, or studying in his room when he’s not, and we exist on a shared, symbiotic interest in saying little about ourselves. We even spread a jigsaw puzzle over the unused dining room table, a 3000 piece meditation on the color blue that will take us forever, and in this way we stave off having to talk about much. Morris is not a people person. When I first came to check out the apartment, because I could not afford to rent a place on my own, I learned that he had just returned from a research trip to Iceland.
“Wow, how was it?” I asked.
“Glaciated,” he said. “Highly volcanic, relatively speaking.”
Lan does not get a call from the pen factory. None of the clients whose names I pass along get hired by the pen factory. Apparently, the pen factory is at quota. Mostly, if my clients got jobs, they are at coffee shops, sandwich shops, chain shoe stores. Lan gets a job at a hotel by the harbor and Ifrah is an aide at a nursing home for now. Others are stocking the aisles at grocery stores, cleaning veterinary labs at the local universities. All sorts of tucked away places where the people rushing through are too busy to have to notice them.
“So what brings you here?” Ellis had asked me during my interview for the position. Now I try this question on my clients, though I know their answers can’t fully explain what has led them all the way to Boston, to this bland building and my own cold little room. My clients come here with hopes of a better life. Because they have family here. To make money. To study English. To go to college. To get a job. To escape social/religious/racial/other persecution. The new electronic database has a blank box that simply asks “Reason:” and their is never enough room for the answer.
At my own interview I told Ellis how my parents had immigrated to California from Northern Ireland in the 80s, tired of the unrest and flailing economy. “I can relate to the women who come to the Center,” I said, even though that was my parents’ history and not mine, even though I was born here, pale-skinned and English speaking with only the slightest lilt to some of my words. I had no need for assimilation classes.
I imagine my mother’s story in Ellis’s voice: Ava, 32, Irish, orphaned, married, pregnant, aptitude for math. My story: Maeve, 25, American, B.A. in French, secure and easy life…
I applied for the job because I thought it sounded like a nice thing to do. Helping people, what was so wrong with that? And I want to feel like I am. Except most of the time, I’m not sure I’m actually helping or just shuffling these women from one hopeless place to another.
Behind me a row of industrial washing machines thump sheets and towels round to a steady beat. Ceiling fans whir in futile circles. I watch the pale blue double doors leading to the housekeepers’ locker room. The manager, arms crossed, loafer tapping against the concrete floor, watches me. Her eyes are like a half-eclipsed sun, or Medusa—better off avoided. Air hums, the floor trembles, the whole room ready to take off. It seems enough to drive anyone over the edge.
“We just can’t have things like this happening,” the manager says for a third time.
“I know. I’m very sorry.”
“The guests are our priority.”
“Of course.”
When Lan comes through the swinging doors, changed from her uniform into thin pink sweatpants and a gray t-shirt, she doesn’t say anything. Her eyes are unfocused and red, her black hair trailing loose from its bun. I lead her through the underground maze, out the first service door we find, and escape into a bright gasp of cold December air.
“It’s okay,” I tell her, though I am no longer sure, though Lan still hasn’t said a word, though this is the third job she has lost in almost five months.
When the hotel called, saying Lan had gone catatonic, I borrowed Morris’s car and screeched through downtown traffic to get to her. Now we find his silver Prius on a side street and I drive us to my apartment near Kendall Square, Lan silent beside me.
I make tea and we sit at the dining room table smoothing our thumbs across the puzzle pieces, the different, shiny shades of blue.
“What happened?” I ask, knowing the question is pointless but, nevertheless, the sort of thing I am supposed to say.
Lan shrugs. “I am working, and suddenly, I remember. The Before Times. I freeze.”
We sit at the puzzle, searching for pieces, until the sky darkens and Lan curls up on the couch with a spare blanket, sleeps.
At work I don’t tell Marla or any of the pack about Lan, not just yet. I don’t want them to overwhelm her with questions, and I don’t want them to think I can’t do my job. My co-workers are always so busy, and though they are patient when I come to them for advice, I can tell they are anxious to get back to their own work.
Instead I cast my net wider, leave another message for the pen factory. I renew my commitment to these women, to the seriousness of my responsibilities. I lace my sneakers when I get home and hit the pavement with a strangely clear mind, one step, another, it feels like progress.
508-258-2360: Lan, it’s Maeve, good news. The pen factory has a job!
508-258-2360: You can start Monday, 7:00 am. OK?
617-702-2824: OK. Thank you.
508-258-2360: Will text you address later. Have a good weekend!
617-702-2824: It rains and cold, take care.
In January I hear that a college acquaintance is also living in Boston, and we meet up one night for drinks at a bar on Boylston Street where the music throbs across two crowded stories. Cassie and her friends reveal tank tops under their winter jackets, and heels on their feet, hair curled and styled in ways I’ve never been able to master.
We walk like a line of baby ducks toward the bar and do one shot, another, bring our drinks to the dance floor. Cassie and I stand to the side to catch up. She is an Accountant or Actuary of some sort—the music is so loud—and works in the Pru, and loves her job, and Boston, and living with her older sister. I picture her in our freshman year statistics class, sweatpants and glasses, raising an eager hand while the rest of the us slump back, floundered by the graphs and numbers.
I tell her the broad strokes of my job, the non-profit world, and she furrows her brow.
“That’s so sad,” she says. “For those women. Like, really sad.” She allows for a somber pause, mines the ice of her vodka tonic with a cocktail straw.
“You know I’ve always wondered, what’s so bad about making a profit?” Immediately, she smiles. “That’s a joke. It’s great, what you do. It would be too depressing for me. Numbers, those are nice and easy.”
A new song thumps on, louder and faster than the one before.
“Love this one,” Cassie says. She runs out to the dance floor to her friends and I follow. I sway awkwardly by their side for a few minutes until I realize they wouldn’t notice if I slipped away, and so I do.
I have forgotten how to be a person. In California I had friends, an easy social life, but here I move in small circles, job, run, eat, sleep. A tiny, careful life. Anything else seems too overwhelming. It hasn’t bothered me so far, but still, on the cab ride home from the bar I look out at the dark and snowy city and am keenly homesick for the first time.
I think of the cab ride I took to LAX. My parents were supposed to drive me that day, my dad and I packing my suitcase and backpack in the trunk a few hours before my flight. But then my mother, who had been good all morning, was no longer good.
“What kind of bondage have I gotten myself into?” she called out, and we came around to the passenger seat to find her impossibly twisted in her seat belt, which might have seemed funny another day but that day only served to highlight how quickly our reality had changed, how this was what I was leaving my father with.
Her eyes showed no signs of recognition as I leaned in to kiss her cheek, say goodbye. We called for a cab and my father took her inside and they watched out the window as I raised my hand, waving weakly from the cab, and then it took me toward the airport, toward Boston.
“I just need a change,” was what I told my friends. Career-wise, L.A. was not for me. It was too superficial at its core, and greater, more important things were being done out East. Sometimes it seems that I moved nearly 3000 miles from home for no greater reason than restlessness, than the idea that a real and different life is only possible in faraway places. I have to believe that things will get easier for me, for Lan. Like my parents, like my clients, I have faith that struggle diminishes the further you get from its source, that whatever problems my new home has will seem less troubling simply because they aren’t my own.
There is a new Lan before me, one who sits straight and tall on the other side of the booth with a cautious smile. Her hair is freshly cut in a bob that cups her round face, the thick ends curving in just below her ears. It suits her.
“You look great,” I say. “I could never pull that off.” My own hair, a wild brown tangle, is wrapped into a bun.
“You think?” she asks shyly.
We order tea and molten lava cakes from the waitress. It is a Saturday and I haven’t seen her in a few weeks, want to know how she is getting on.
She says the job is pretty good. Not the idyll I had imagined, but good enough. She sorts pens, mostly, and it isn’t hard. She can sit (though not on a plush swivel chair), and her boss is nice. Her hands aren’t dry all the time like they were at the hotel job, rubbed raw by cleaning fluids.
The only problem is that her shift has been changed to afternoons, and now she works from 1:00 to 9:00 and it’s dark by the time her train gets in.
“I have a long walk from the station,” she says. “I get nervous.”
I know a cab would be too expensive for her, and maybe just as scary.
“If you ever feel uncomfortable, please call me,” I tell her. “I can always borrow Morris’s car and drive you from the T to your apartment.”
After she calls me once, I start driving her most nights. She gets off the Red Line around ten and I bring her to her apartment door in an average of fifteen minutes—we have timed it. It is an old, neglected house converted into four apartments, and she lives in the top left unit with another Vietnamese woman. I wait for her bedroom light to turn on, for her to wave out the window, and then I drive back home.
On Fridays I tell her she should just get off at Kendall Square and come to my apartment. She sleeps on the couch and then reads the newspaper with us in the morning to practice her English, and we page through Glamour and Vogue because I have learned that she is eager about fashion and style. Outside of my dim, windowless office, Lan is more talkative. She is also eager to learn English, eager to try different pizza toppings, eager to hear about the house I grew up in and whether I prefer carpeted or wood floors. The Center uses donated, out-of-date English textbooks in the ESL classes. I am eager to make your acquaintance, Lan tells Morris the first time they meet. Whenever we agree on a topic, she says, I am of the same mind.
“Is Lan still a client at the Center?” Morris asks me once, which is his only comment about the sudden friendship. Though there is no judgment in his voice, it makes me wonder what Marla or Ellis would think of this arrangement. I know it isn’t professional, but it’s nice to talk with Lan. Neither of us have found good friends here, but now we have each other. On our Saturdays we sometimes walk the Esplanade or go out for lunch. She does not talk about the Before Times other than to say that things are better now, things are getting better. One Sunday Lan and Morris even cheer on the sidelines while I run a 10k and afterward we eat brunch and it is all so normal, so easy, this is life, I think, this is how it could be.
It unravels quickly, in one afternoon. The factory calls me just as I am getting home from work. I take Morris’s car and drive. Get lost. His GPS leads me deep into an industrial park and I wonder how any of the women find it, how long the walk is from their bus stop. The factory is a low slab of concrete with gray double doors. A man behind the front desk leads me to a large back room—one of many—filled with a line of rectangle tables, women wearing blue latex gloves with boxes of pens in front of them.
“So, she won’t move?” the man says like a question. He leads me to a table against the back wall and there is Lan on the ground with her knees pulled to her chest, spilled pens rolling beside her. The other women are still working, no time to stop, pen-making more urgent than I’d thought, but they watch us with a concerned eye.
“It’s me,” I say, coaxing her out, leading her out through the gray double doors, away from the pen factory forever.
She does not want to talk. She wants to go to her apartment and so I drive her there, watch for her usual wave from the window. I try to reach her all weekend but she doesn’t answer.
On Monday, worried, I finally tell Marla the whole story. We drive over to find Lan and her roommate are gone. The apartment is empty save for a few of the Vogues I lent her, cereal boxes in the kitchen, the newspapers taped to the windows in place of curtains. I call Lan’s cell phone and she doesn’t pick up and we drive back to the Center in near silence, Marla shaking her head as she steers.
508-258-2360: Are you okay?
508-258-2360: Did you move?
617-702-2824: I have gone to relatives in NYC. I am sorry. Thank you very much.
Ellis calls me to her office to discuss the situation.
“We could have been getting her more help,” Marla says, pacing the room.
“There are certain lines we need to be careful about overstepping,” she says. “Driving Lan to work, letting her live at your apartment, you should have told us about this, Maeve.”
“She never lived with me,” I say weakly.
“The dishonesty concerns me. And what if something worse had happened to her?”
Ellis intervenes, tells Marla she will take it from here. When we are alone she folds her arms across her chest and settles back in her chair. On the wall above her is a large, faded poster showing a grinning, multicultural cornucopia of people standing in a row, some with arms slung over the shoulders of the people next to them. A giant American flag unfurls across them, corners held by the people at either end of the row. Splashed across the top in big blue letters is a message: WELCOME TO YOUR NEW HOME!
“I’m sorry,” I say. “She was doing so well. I thought we’d reached a turning point.”
Ellis uncrosses her arms and shuffles some folders on her desk.
“We can only do so much,” she says finally. “You’ll get a thicker skin. We have to be like doctors, compassionate but not too involved.”
I promise that I will do better. In the weeks that follow I meet with my clients, try not to give them false hope or offer anything I can’t guarantee. I chip away at the paper-to-electronic file transfers. I even cover some of the afternoon ESL classes when the teacher is out sick. The students spend the whole hour with workbooks open, identifying nouns and verbs, trying to remember the difference between “a” and “the”, writing short paragraphs about themselves. I walk around the room and answers questions if a student raises their hand.
“How do you say, uh, ‘happy mouth?’”
“Like this? Smile,” I explain, and the student nods, satisfied. I am satisfied as well. It feels nice to have an answer so readily at hand, to offer something concrete.
Two months pass. I don’t hear from Lan, but Marla, persistent and concerned, tracks her down, finds out she is in New York, working in a Chinese food restaurant and does not want us to worry about her, she will be fine.
I have been at the Center for nearly a year when Kathy moves on to a job in the corporate world. I take over her position as Intake Supervisor and we hire a new, doe-eyed me to fill my spot. I train with Marla for two weeks, going with her to the airport to pick up new clients, shadowing her intake interviews, jotting down advice on everything our new clients might need.
Then the training period is over. On Sunday night I sit at our dining room table and look over an e-mail from Ellis: Aminah, 32, Pakistani, widowed, two young children, Logan ETA 11:47. I read it out loud, memorizing the details. Morris makes a triangle with his thumbs and index fingers and tells me Pakistan is a mostly mountainous, red-clayed region.
I take the Center’s van to Logan Airport and pick up Aminah and her two sons. The boys watch with wide eyes as the city passes by out the window. They both have Spiderman backpacks. I don’t know what I expected. At the apartment in East Boston, I show Aminah how to use the oven, the thermostat. I show her the groceries in the cupboard and the fresh, scratchy bedding and the sagging, donated couches and beds. I stick a list to the fridge with important numbers to call, police and firemen and the maintenance company and how to reach us at the Center. I realize we never got the right size blinds for the picture window in the living room, and promise to bring them by tomorrow or the next day. I remind her about our English classes and employment services. The first four months of rent are covered by the Center, but after that she is on her own. Aminah listens politely to my speech.
“Well,” I say at the end, smile. “I guess that’s it.”
Now is when I am supposed to leave. Now is when Aminah is supposed to start her new life. We look at each other, both of us blinking, bewildered, like we are still waiting to be told all the most important things.
Amanda Emil Anderson is a graduate of the MFA Writing, Literature and Publishing program at Emerson College, where she won two Graduate Writing Awards in Fiction. In 2013, she received an Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers.